Redfin Mortgage Rate Lock
Mortgage Advisors work with borrowers to find them the best loan solution. Locking the rate on the right timing is important. How might we streamline the rate search and lock experience?
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When Redfin Mortgage Advisors search loan products and lock a mortgage rate for borrowers, they had to go out of Redfin's loan origination system, Lender Tools, and put all the borrower information into our third party vendor, Optimal Blue's website, then save the product and rate back to LT. Lots of time wasted. Lots of number could go wrong and hit our margin.
We integrated Optimal Blue into Lender Tools to save Mortgage Advisors at least 20 minutes per loan and reduce cures for pricing errors.
Time
Q3 - Q4 2020
Team
Yuchen Tong
Evan Kutter (PM)
Mortgage engineering
Vendor
Optimal Blue
My Role
UX research, UX design
Pre-filled information with the flexibility to tweak
No more manual entering.
The Optimal Blue search experience is overwhelming. MAs needed to manually enter lots of information on a dense interface.
Optimal Blue
Redfin Lender Tools
Based on user research and understanding of Optimal Blue's API, we figured out the necessary amount of information we need to get rate results. We pre-filled the search criteria with the information in Lender Tools, and exposed the fields MAs would frequently tweak to run different loan scenarios with borrowers.
Remove unnecessary info and make the action clear.
Better hierarchy for search results.
Optimal Blue
Redfin Lender Tools
Search criteria and results side by side
Run different loan scenarios with ease.
Loan amount, loan type, credit score, Debit to Income ratio can all impact your eligibility for a loan product and the interest rate. MAs usually run loan scenarios with different parameters to find out the best loan solution for their customer.
This side-by-side design empowers MAs to run loan scenarios without going back and forth, and always have the context for the search results.
Always double-checking
Peace of the mind.
One recurring feedback we heard from user testing was MAs always want to confirm "everything" before they lock and rate and save the information back to Lender Tools. We thus created the Rate Lock Summary page for MAs to go through all the details in this focused flow.
Be aware of changes
Always up-to-date.
When MAs submit a rate lock request or a change requests, the request has to go through Secondary Market for approval. When borrowers credit or DTI changes, rate lock would also be impacted. One primary goal of this project is to make Lender Tools always in sync with Optimal Blue and the real world. We went through all the possible scenarios for a comprehensive notification system on rate lock.
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